3/28/08

Video-hosting site LiveLeak pulled the controversial anti-Quran film Fitna Friday afternoon, citing a barrage of threats.

The 17-minute film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, posted Thursday, received more than 3 million views before being taken offline. Fitna juxtaposes passages from the Islamic holy book with graphic footage of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe. In one scene,the sound of paper ripping can be seen as a reader pages through the Quran.

Put together as a warning that Islam poses a threat to the Netherlands, Fitna includes newspaper headlines about terror attacks, graphic images of beheadings at the hands of Islamic radicals, and a riot-provoking Danish cartoon from 2005 that depicts the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

In place of the video Friday afternoon, a brief and poignant message appears on-screen: "Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature.... LiveLeak has been left with no choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

"This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net.... We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support."

Wilders released the 17-minute film via LiveLeak despite concerns voiced by the Dutch government and international organizations.

IOWA CITY, Iowa - County officials have given their informal OK for ghost hunters to check out a one-time Iowa insane asylum to see if any spirits are lurking about.

The Johnson County Board of Supervisors took the initial action on the request from the Johnson County Historical Society, which gives tours of the 153-year-old building.

Brandon Cochran, museum operations assistant for the historical society, said there have never been reports of ghosts or bizarre happenings at the building and bringing in a paranormal team is "kind of taking the pre-emptive approach."

He wants an Iowa-based paranormal investigative team to come in for one night. Cochran said he hopes they don't find any paranormal activity and the investigation can put to rest any speculation.

A four-person Carroll Area Paranormal Team will use thermal imaging equipment and voice-recording systems, Cochran said.

A date for an investigation wasn't set and an agreement will have to be drafted releasing the county of any liability before the supervisors formally approve the request, Cochran said.

The remaining wing was built in 1855 and housed mentally ill patients who were deemed insane. It was a self-sufficient 65-hectare site with residents growing corn, potatoes, wheat, hay and tobacco.

The building is now called Chatham Oaks and houses people with physical and mental disabilities. Chatham Oaks officials said there wouldn't be a problem with the paranormal team coming in as long as it didn't disturb residents.

The Church of Scientology has refuted claims by an independent French news Web site, the Anonymous Group and the Enturbulation that a video posted to the church's new Video Channel includes bogus or misleading footage of non-existent dignitaries singing the praises of the controversial religion's youth humanitarian efforts.

The video in question – Human Rights, In Support of Human Rights – featured on the Scientology Video Channel includes more than 20 unnamed dignitaries from various political, cultural and educational occupations promoting the Youth for Human Rights campaign; a movement in which the Church of Scientology is only one of over 30 sponsors. Only the speakers distinguished job titles are offered to the viewers as a means for judging the credibility of the speaker's statements.

The satirical French news site Bakchich – a similar publication to Australia's Crikey news site – claimed that a so-called representative from the mayor's office in Marseille did not exist. "The fellow in the video was perfectly unknown to the municipal team," said the article's author after contacting the mayor's office in Marseille.

The Church of Scientology told PC World it was unfathomable that he would not be recognised, as he was at the time of the interview the deputy mayor of the seventh arrondissement of the city of Marseille.The Bakchich article also brought into question the comments made by a so-called representative from the 'Council of European Communities'.

The Church of Scientology said the speaker is the retired president of the civil servant's trade union of the Council of the European Union, the current name of the Council of European Communities.

Bakchich showed the video to the media service for the council of ministers of the European Union, who replied that the name 'Council of European Communities' did not correspond with any institute of the European Union, and that the video, which does not indicate the names of any of the speakers, did not strike them as convincing.

The director of media for the European Parliament, Jaume Duch, told Bakchich that no one in the video worked or belonged to the European Parliament.

Two Australians are also featured in the video praising the Youth for Human Rights campaign. PC World discovered that one was correctly identified in the video as a member of the Legislative Council, Parliament of NSW.

The other, described in the Scientology video as a Commissioner for Community Relations, Sydney, Australia, could not be identified. The media manager for the NSW government Community Relations Commission said that the person in the video is not a commissioner of the CRC, and no one from the CRC has been authorised to speak on behalf of the CRC on that video.

PC World was told by one of the persons featured in the video – who did not wish to be named – that they were upset that their comments relating to Youth for Human Rights was included in a video promoting Scientology, and that they felt their comments had been taken out of context. They said they had contacted the Church asking for their appearance in the video to be removed.

Enturbulation, a source for information on activism against the Church of Scientology, features a thread posted by users that claims to have identified more speakers in the Scientology video whose identities or job titles are either false, fabricated or embellished.

The Church of Scientology did not respond to questions as to why they did not include the names of such apparently distinguished interviewees in its videos, but said the Church stands by its Video Channel.

TALLAHASSEE -- A bill to ensure teachers can scientifically criticize evolution was made less controversial Wednesday when it was re-written to all but bar the controversial theory of Intelligent Design in science classrooms.Originally, the bill encouraged teachers to present the ''full range'' of ''scientific information'' about evolution, but it didn't define what that information is.

And that lead to the real possibility that teachers could profess the Intelligent Design, which a 2005 federal court banned from Pennsylvania science classrooms because it was a religious theory in that it posits an intelligent cause -- God to most adherents -- designed biological organisms.

To quell critics who thought that she was trying to sneak religion in the classroom, Sen. Ronda Storms, a Valrico Republican, decided to define scientific information as ``germane current facts, data, and peer-reviewed research specific to the topic of chemical and biological evolution as prescribed in Florida's Science Standards.''

Storms said the standards are too ''dogmatic'' and could unfairly lead to penalties of teachers and students who question evolution.

Storm's changes pleased scientists like as Paul Cottle, an FSU physics professor, and Gerry Meisels, a chemistry professor at the University of South Florida. Both men helped form the new state science standards, approved last month by the Board of Education, that evolution be explicitly taught clearly and consistently for the first time in Florida public schools.

They both noted that the standards already call for critical thinking, so they questioned the motives of the religiously minded groups pushing for the bill.

The findings, published yesterday in Nature, shed doubt on a creationist criticism of evolution: that adaptation must rapidly slow as creatures grow more complicated, making them less able to adapt to changing conditions.

Led by Yale University evolutionary biologist Gunter Wagner, researchers measured the cumulative effects of genetic mutations in mice. Would tweaking a gene affect many different unrelated traits, thus imposing a "cost of complexity"? Or would the genetic ripple be constrained?

The latter, found the researchers: the effects of mutations were indeed multiple, but largely limited to related characteristics. The researchers also found no relationship between effect strength and the number of affected traits. Some scientists have wondered whether these would vary inversely, further slowing the pace of adaptation in complex organisms.

"I think the main broader impact of this work is on the evolution-creationism debate," wrote Wagner in an email. "I would say the only intellectually interesting argument that the creationists are using, at least the scientifically more sophisticated ones, is that random mutation can not lead to the evolution of complex organisms. And there are interesting mathematical arguments that have been made to support that. But our results show that organisms found a way around that problem by restricting mutational effects on very narrowly confined parts of the organisms."

CANCUN, Mexico — Two men have confessed to brutally killing a man who made his living practicing witchcraft because they believed he had put an "evil eye" on a relative, officials on Mexico's Caribbean coast said Monday.

The two men, and a third who remained at large Monday, stabbed 28-year-old Lucas Dominguez seven times, crushed his skull with a rock and tried to burn his body, according to Luis Raymundo Canche, assistant prosecutor for Quintana Roo state. The attack occurred Saturday near the resort of Cancun.

Canche said Pedro Nunez Alvarez, 24, and Gustavo Perez Nunez, 19, were arrested Sunday and that both confessed, blaming Dominguez for the suicide of Nunez Alvarez's father.

"The victim made his living practicing witchcraft and had given the 'evil eye' to the suspects' relative, to such an extent that the spell eventually killed him," Canche said.

The suspects — all of whom are related — said they acted partly in self-defense because they feared Dominguez could cast a similar spell on them, according to the prosecutor.

The men told investigators they wrapped Dominguez's body in a sheet and were preparing to "purify" his corpse with fire, but fled the scene after hearing noises.

HOUSTON—According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. "After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water," the report read in part. "Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren't prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and 43 percent are eaten by birds." The report concluded that, of the 170 billion prayers issued last month, one made it to God, whose reply was intercepted by a hurricane and incorrectly delivered to a Nigerian man who reportedly did not know what to do with his brand-new Bowflex machine.

Demonstrating the Lord works in mysterious ways, University of Oxford academics have received a research grant of pound stg. 1.9 million (which equals the Tasmanian budget on the present exchange rate) to investigate why people believe in God.

That the question has come up at all is a sign, not necessarily a divine one, of the times.

A century ago the answer would have been obvious: people believed in God because the supreme being's existence was manifest, what with him (never her) being omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient.

Two hundred years back, believing in God was also essential to stay out of the slammer, what with the way atheists tended to end up under arrest whenever the state was short ofscapegoats.

Before then, believing in God, particularly the version the king was keen on, was essential to avoid heresy charges: never a good career move.

But today there is no script to stick to. Everybody has to work out whether they believe in God and academics are to ask questions that once would have seemed silly, or suicidal.

According to The Times, the Oxford scholars will spend the money on working out whether believing in God is a matter of nature or nurture.

The nurture argument says we believe what we are told.

This will appeal to the sorts of clergy who are more interested in revolution than the resurrection. People who believe in God are reared in families where they are taught compassion for others, responsibility for their actions and to have faith that people of goodwill can work together for the greater good. As such, believers are obviously sinners, damned because they clearly do not need divine assistance as much as individuals who don't know or don't care if God exists.

These people do not get a go in the nature theory, which holds that humanity is genetically hard-wired to believe in gods. Apparently since the dawn of time, a belief in a supreme being, who keeps a note on what we are up to, has given individuals a reason to live and get along with each other.

Maybe this is so. After all, people have faith in things much lighter on for evidence: that Brendan Nelson will be PM, that Wayne Swan will work out what NAIRU means.

As for the evolution argument, that religion helped humanity survive, maybe hymn singing among our ancient ancestors kept the sabre-toothed tigers outside the cave and the threat of human sacrifice to appease the gods kept everybody in tune. Who knows? But the problem with this argument is that, rather than die out, there are more non-believers than there were when atheism was a capital crime.

When you take into account the cost of international travel to conferences to consider these weighty questions, it's obvious the boffins will battle to manage on a mere two million quid.

So it's a good thing they will not have enough money to get into the doctrinal detail. Because finding people to explain the Albigensian heresy and scholars who are across the finer points of Socinianism is not cheap. And this is before anybody gets interested in other religions, which have doctrinal differences of their own.

An even better reason to leave the detail alone is that people get worked up over it. It's not that long ago that Europeans went to war over whether there should be statues in church, and fanatics of many theological flavours are still keen to kill everybody who does not agree with them. So we should praise whoever that it's only the reason religion exists that is on the agenda.

This also means there is one idea that will definitely not get a guernsey. That's the possibility that people believe in a supreme being because a large voice told them to sit up spiritually straight or because they have a deep faith in a divine presence. This is an obviously absurd idea. After all, it makes as much sense as believing the sacred religious texts are divinely inspired. And what theological scholar could come at that?

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said.

They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said.

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

Telephone messages left at the Neumann home by The Associated Press were not immediately returned.

The family does not attend an organized church or participate in an organized religion, Vergin said. "They have a little Bible study of a few people."

The parents told investigators their daughter last saw a doctor when she was 3 to get some shots, Vergin said. The girl had attended public school during the first semester but didn't return for the second semester.

Officers went to the home after one of the girl's relatives in California called police to check on her, Vergin said. She was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead.

The relative was fearful the girl was "extremely ill, dire," Vergin said.

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

"They are still in the home," he said. "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

The girl's death remains under investigation and the findings will be forwarded to the district attorney to review for possible charges, the chief said.

The family operates a coffee shop in Weston, which is a suburb of Wausau, Vergin said."